


an absence of red

by aplacetostand



Series: the weight of a name [1]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, F/M, Minor Alex Danvers/Maggie Sawyer, Minor Kara Danvers/Jimmy Olsen, Minor Kara Danvers/Mon-El
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-14
Updated: 2017-05-14
Packaged: 2018-10-31 16:18:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10902969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aplacetostand/pseuds/aplacetostand
Summary: Kara looks at Clark sometimes and for a second, she thinks it might be her uncle, for a second she sees a glimmer of a red sun, gets overwhelmed by the smells of home, before she shakes it off. Clark wouldn’t understand, she knows, as human as his parents, the Kents, not the Els. He doesn’t carry the weight of an entire civilization on his shoulders. A culture lost and a language forgotten do not sit as heavy in his heart as it does in Kara’s.A Kara Danvers character study. Canon compliant until Mon-El kisses Kara.





	an absence of red

**Author's Note:**

> this got written because i feel like supergirl really does not focus enough on how dangerous kara could be, and how much rage she must have, how much grief she must live with every day, and how i honestly think she could be more dangerous than clark

An absence of red. Or, an abundance of it.

Kara looks at Clark sometimes and for a second, she thinks it might be her uncle, for a second she sees a glimmer of a red sun, gets overwhelmed by the smells of home, before she shakes it off. Clark wouldn’t understand, she knows, as human as his parents, the Kents, not the Els. He doesn’t carry the weight of an entire civilization on his shoulders. A culture lost and a language forgotten do not sit as heavy in his heart as it does in Kara’s. Clark (the first year on earth she has to repeat his name to herself late at night to make sure she remembers he is no longer her baby cousin Kal-El, that he is human, that his name is Clark, Clark, Clark) is human with a twist, as he laughingly explained to her one of the few times he had deemed it safe to come visit. Kara does not tell him that she doesn’t think she’ll ever feel human, that she can’t let go of her home, that the ache isn’t lessening, that she is just getting more used to it. She doesn’t tell him that she feels out of place not just because she’s from Krypton, the last to have grown up there, the last to remember the feel of a red sun on her face, but because these powers she suddenly has sets her apart from Kryptonians too. She feels alien in her own skin, not because she is an alien among humans, but because she is no longer a regular kryptonian girl. 

Slowly, through the years, she learns to control her powers, learns to control her rage, to swallow her grief and smile around the pit in her stomach when she remembers her family, learns how to pass as human, how to not use her powers, how to hide. Clark is Superman, Clark is a hero, Clark is a god, and she wonders what her parents would say about her baby cousin growing up without kryptonian lullabies and fairy tales, a saviour to the people he considers his. There are people who fear him, she knows, and she wonders if they would fear her too if they knew about her.

She learns to conceal her rage, learns how to hand out smiles like gifts, how to laugh even on the worst days when the yellow sun doesn’t feel quite right in her eyes. The first time Kara looks at Alex and thinks "sister" they’re sitting on the roof looking up at the stars and Alex says “tell me about Krypton.” and lets Kara talk all night, lets Kara cry on her shoulder, lets Kara feel and miss and grieve. She builds a home with the Danvers family, lets herself feel their warmth and care and love and she lets it shape her, the human Kara Danvers, the person she tries to pass as to everyone else, but also to herself. Kara Danvers, human, has lost her parents too, carries her grief with her everywhere, but there’s less devastation, less rage. Kara Zor-El, refugee, has more rage than she knows what to do with, and so she lets herself be human, tries to let go of her rage. 

(It doesn’t work.)

When she falls over on her bike, there are no bruises, no blood trickling down her arm from her elbow, no evidence at all that she even fell other than a slight dent in the bike, and she wonders if someone who never really bleeds can ever learn how to be human. She tries not to think of the absences of red in her life; blood when she gets injured, the warmth of her mother, her father, her aunt, the red sun in the sky. At school the teachers try to get her to introduce herself, ask easy questions for her to answer in front of the class like “how old are you” (older than she looks, her real age only measured in the lines on Clark’s face), “where are you from” (she carries a long gone planet in her bones and wonders if that means she is gone too), “what’s your favourite colour?”. When she answers the last one, it accidentally comes out sounding more like a prayer than a simple answer.

“Red.”

She stops using her powers, wonders who she is without them, if it makes her human to not use them, and learns how to build a life. She starts working at CatCo, tries to be a good sister, a good daughter, a good cousin, a good friend, a good employee. When Alex’s plane almost goes down she relishes in being able to use her powers again, loves the way it makes her feel closer to Kal - to Clark, and she doesn’t understand Alex’s reaction. After all, if Kara could help, was it not her duty to this planet that had let her seek refuge, that had taken her cousin in and given him a home and a people? 

The first time she puts on the suit that Winn made her she wants to cry, wants to rage for a family and a world lost, but instead she smiles and tells him about the family crest, tells him what it means. She flies off and tries to live up to her family’s expectations, wonders if this means Clark will finally deem it safe to hang out more than a couple of times a year, if this means she’s getting further from the girl that left Krypton or closer to her. When she causes the oil spill, she wonders if people will look at Supergirl and think dangerous like they do when they look at Superman. Instead she’s met with “reckless” and “incompetent” and she nearly breaks down, nearly calls Clark just to hear him speak Kryptonian, even if it is with an accent. Instead she brushes off the hurt, the anger, buries it within her, and tries again with Alex in her ear, Alex at her side. 

Alex gets taken and Kara’s only thought is that she needs to get her sister back. Alex is the only person who knows enough about Kara’s grief to even begin to understand how wonderful her smile is, how she doesn’t always cover her rage well enough, and Kara wants to yell at Hank Henshaw, wants to fight him for not letting her look out for Alex, but instead she takes a deep breath and goes looking. (She knows her rage could tear her apart, that her grief could leave her empty, but she also knows she could tear the world apart, tear humans in two if she isn’t careful, and so she takes a deep breath and focuses on Alex.) When she sees Astra it feels like her world is crumbling again, she feels herself tear open with the knowledge that she is no longer the only one to carry a planet on her back, to look up at the sky and for a second forget that yellow is not red. 

Astra tears Kara’s world apart, makes her look at her hands and see them dripping with blood, with the crimes of her family, and she adds it to the weight on her shoulders. She learns how to navigate her life with this pain, too, how to smile and laugh and be sunny Kara Danvers, tries to let Kara Zor-El, the child of a long lost world, go until she is alone and can allow herself to feel grief, anger, pain, without worrying that it will tear someone else apart. There is still comfort in not being the last, even while chasing Astra down. Even with the knowledge that Kara has to fight her, this part of her home and childhood is comforting. 

Then, Astra dies and Kara doesn’t know what to do because it’s been years since she’s had to lose someone. She cries and cries and tries so hard to reign in her rage and her grief and she lets Alex hold her. She lets Clark send her a text saying that he’s sorry, even if he can’t understand. He considers Krypton the final piece of a puzzle that makes him complete and for her it’s a gaping hole. His first language is English, it’s the language of his parents, the language that sang him lullabies and gave him laughter under a yellow sky, and she wants to tell jokes in her mother tongue, let them roll of her tongue and have someone understand. Clark never shakes his English accent in Kryptonian, even if Kara pretends for his sake that it sounds natural. She wonders if he could ever understand the magnitude of what she’s lost. 

(She knows he can’t.)

After the episode with red kryptonite, she wonders if they’ll fear her the way they fear her cousin, if they’ll finally see what she’s capable of if she lets her rage flow free, but they forget easily when she smiles and rescues kittens out of trees and saves little girls from bullies. They forget the way she could easily leave destruction in her wake, the way she could tear the whole city apart if she wants to, because she looks soft and breakable, even in her suit. Kara doesn’t forget though. She wonders if this is a kindness or a curse.

She remembers the feeling of the red kryptonite, the feeling of letting her anger and loss take over, the feeling of letting go and letting herself be Kara Zor-El in public for once, instead of kind and cute Kara Danvers. She sets up punching bags in the kryptonite room and she breaks them, her punches coming hard and fast and in this room at least she doesn’t have to worry about tearing anyone but herself and inanimate objects apart. She wonders if she is finally ready to let herself be torn apart. 

People forget about Supergirl’s rage, about the way the girl of steel could just as easily be the girl of destruction, and Kara lets them. She knows she will never completely trust her powers again, not when she knows how easily she can be turned, how easily she can give in to her anger. She goes to J’onn, knows he might understand her pain at losing a world, but she is still a child in his eyes and she knows it. He might be the only person who could understand, but there’s a distance there, even as they become a family. He calls her Kara Danvers, looks at Alex and Eliza and thinks family, and she does too, but it’s not the same. He understands her pain, carries it himself, but he worries less about destroying an entire world because of his rage. 

(She wonders if this makes her a monster.)

When Alex tells her “Kara, this isn’t you” and she answers “I’m more me than I’ve ever been” she’s almost surprised by the intensity with which she still feels it after the effects of the red kryptonite are long gone. For a few days, she had gotten to be Kara Zor-El, the one who wasn’t afraid to be excellent because it would make her stand out. A person who didn’t purposefully get math questions wrong on tests to seem unremarkable, the person who didn’t try to hide behind a carefully crafted persona of being mediocre, of blending in. For a short while she had gotten to be brilliant, to wear clothes that made people stare, to do everything the way she knew she was capable, to allow herself to be selfish, and it was so easy to give in to. Kara Danvers is good, but Kara Zor-El shines, and when she goes back to being herself, when the effects disappear, she wonders what her life would have been like if she had let herself be excellent her entire life. 

She puts this loss, too, on her back.

Kara kisses James and lets herself get lost in it, lets herself want. In the end, it doesn’t matter if she wants, if he wants, if she thinks that one more step and she would fall in love with him, because he is too good and there’s a crushing weight, a devastating rage, an encompassing grief, in every cell of her being. When she ends it, she sees his sadness, his confusion. He tries to tell her that he knows what it is like to try to live up to your parents, what they wanted you to be, what they dreamt of, but Kara just shakes her head. She could let herself fall, she knows, could let herself get lost in James Olsen, but he was Clark’s first. He thinks he understands Krypton, thinks he understands the weight of the name El because he knows Clark, and that is something she decides she can’t live with. He is wonderful, but he could never be hers.

(Does that make it harder or easier to say goodbye?)

When Mon-El lands on earth, there is a split second when Kara looks at the pod and thinks “Krypton”, thinks “mother”, thinks “father”. When the door opens to a man from Daxam, her grief feels heavier than it did before, knowing it was not just her own world she must carry on her back, but also the ones affected by Krypton’s destruction. She wonders how many planets she can carry on her shoulders before she can no longer stand.

Clark comes to visit, under the pretense of wanting to talk to Lena Luthor, but Kara knows he wants to check up on her, make sure that she is okay after another loss. She is vaguely annoyed about her baby cousin babying her, but she comes along to his interview, sees how the name “Luthor” tastes bitter in his mouth. He makes it sound like a curse and Kara wonders if the name El was ever used that way on Krypton. She sees the distrust in his eyes, and yet, when Lena says “I’m just a woman trying to make a name for herself outside of her family, can you understand that?” Kara sees the weight of her family’s crimes on Lena’s back, the same way she wears them on her own, and when she answers “yeah” it’s instinctive. It’s not so much that she wants to be separate from Clark, from Superman, in her identity as Supergirl as it is that she is trying to build a life for herself in spite of what her family did, tries to be a force for good with a name on her back that carries more weight than she’d like. She looks at Lena Luthor and understands in a way what it means to be adopted and not feel like you belong, what it means to carry a family name you wonder if you deserve, what it means to carry a legacy on your back. Clark looks hurt at her admission, but Kara smiles at Lena and Lena smiles back and she wonders if Clark would murder her for being friends with a Luthor. 

(It doesn’t matter what he thinks, she’s still going to do it.)

When Lena suggests she could be a reporter, she wonders if this is something she could do for herself, without Clark feeling like she was trying to follow in his steps. She had wanted to be a scientist back home, but here on earth, far from her safe little room, she wonders if uncovering the truth as a journalist isn’t a better use of her talents. As a journalist, at least, she does not have to hide knowledge she knows to be true, does not have to try to be outshined by others. It’s a career she thinks she could be good at, but still have to work for everything. She wonders if this is why Clark became a reporter, or if he has a more human reason for it.

(She’s not sure she wants to know the answer.)

She tries to get Mon-El adjusted to life on earth the way the Danvers’ did for her, but it’s hard. She looks at him and thinks “you know what it’s like to carry the weight of a world”, she looks at him and thinks “enemy”. Still, she tries. There is one person in the universe who might truly understand the way a yellow sun feels wrong and the loss of an entire culture, and so she tries to befriend him, tries to teach him how to navigate this strange new world he is in. Tries to not make his name sour in her mouth. 

(She tries and he doesn’t and she tries not to put that weight on her back too, but what’s one more person on top of the weight she already carries.)

When Alex tells her about herself, tells her about Maggie, tells her about this thing that has been eating her up inside, Kara holds her. Lets her know that she is loved, presses down her own anger at this world for making Alex afraid, ashamed, alone, presses down the anger at herself for not making room for Alex’s secrets in their lives. She does not say “Krypton would have welcomed you”, does not say “girls are beautiful and I feel this too”, does not say “I feel the loss of my world every day”. She holds Alex and lets her know that it is okay, she is okay, she will be okay, and looks up at the still unfamiliar sky. She says a silent prayer to a long gone god and holds her sister. This, at least, is normal. This, at least, grounds her.

When Alex and Maggie get together, Kara can see the weight lifted off her sister’s shoulders, sees her floating, sees her truly happy in a way she hasn’t been in years and she wonders if that is something she could have too, in this strange land with its odd customs and freedom of choice. She looks at Alex and feels a weight lift off her shoulders. The knowledge that she is no longer holding Alex back from a normal life makes her feel lighter than she has in years. She is thankful to have a life where weights can lessen, where smiles can be gifts, where her rage can be hidden. She is thankful to have carved out a human life for herself, even on the days where she isn’t sure she deserves it.

When he kisses her, Mon-El kisses like he expects to get his way, like he knows without a doubt that she will love him, like he knows no one else could measure up to him and she wonders at his confidence, at how he can only be months away from losing a home and already be ready to let it go. She thinks about it, about how she could probably fall in love with him, could probably live out her days with him, with someone who understands, but. He is reckless where she has spent years learning to be careful. He is ready to throw everything she has carefully built for herself away, while she clings on tightly to her life, to this life she has fought to have. She wonders what a life with him would be like and sees a glimmer of red kryptonite in his eyes, sees danger, sees devastation, and she closes her eyes. 

She turns him down, tells him that this is not what she wants, that it has nothing to do with her family and all to do with her and what she wants with her life. She is not sure he believes her. She does not need him to. She has seen her family do awful things out of duty, out of honour, out of love, and she will not let herself do the same. When he looks at her like he is going to attack her, she conjures up Eliza’s warm smile and puts it on her face, tells him “I’m sorry” even if she does not mean it. She puts on Eliza’s smile and thinks “mother”, straightens up the way Alex taught her and thinks “sister”, puts steel in her gaze and thinks “family”. 

Kara befriends Lena, or Lena befriends Kara, but somehow they end up friends, and Kara wonders a little if Lena is the only person who might understand how it feels to carry the legacy of a name that has hurt so many on your shoulders. She can tell Lena knows she is Supergirl, knows that Lena is aware Clark is Superman and that she is not dumb, and she wonders if it would make a difference if they acknowledge it. Lena knows, and Kara knows that Lena knows, and the world doesn’t end. They go out for dinner and they have movie nights and Kara lets herself get lost in red smiles and warm hugs, lets herself fall because she thinks Lena Luthor won’t let her crash, thinks “safe”. She is thankful for a life that let her have this. 

Lena kisses her on a Tuesday, and Kara works very hard to not let any of her powers get out of control, tries very hard to keep any destruction under her skin even as carefully crafted walls and barriers get broken down. She feels lighter and she feels heavier with the knowledge that Lena sees her, sees Kara, not Danvers, not Zor-El, not Supergirl. She places her hands very carefully on Lena’s face, lets herself kiss back, closes her eyes out of fear. She wonders if Clark feels this when he’s with Lois, if he sees her as breakable, as fragile, himself as this monstrous, clumsy thing that could break her in half on accident. She wonders if he would give an honest answer if she asked. 

When she tells Alex about the kiss, she very carefully leaves out the part where Kara is afraid because this is so very different from Krypton and she wonders if by allowing herself this, she loses another part of her home. She leaves out the part where she is always afraid of hurting the people around her, even more so in situations where normal people can allow themselves to lose control. She listens to Alex yell about the Luthor name and tries very hard to not bring up Jeremiah and the Danvers name. She listens to Clark yell about how you can never trust a Luthor, and she puts the phone down on the table before she can crumple it in her hand. She does not say “if Lena is a monster by association of a name, what am I?”. She does not say “I am older than you, you do not get to lecture me!”. Instead she puts the phone down, lets him yell, and then very quietly says “we all have family members that have done awful things, Kal. That does not make us awful people.” She wonders after if she believes it to be true when it comes to herself.

(She isn’t sure.)

They are in Kara’s apartment the first time Kara directly references not being from earth. It’s a mundane thing; Lena says something about how the sun looked a bit weird today, and Kara says “it’s yellow, of course it looks weird” before freezing, holding her breath, trying to avoid looking at Lena. It’s one thing for both of them to know, it’s another to acknowledge it, for Kara to say it so openly to someone. It is only the second time she gets to reveal it herself because she wants to, not because someone else told. It’s exhilarating and terrifying and she’s scared to move, wonders if this is something that would cause a human to shake, but Lena just laughs a little, says “I suppose it would to you” before wrapping her arms around Kara from behind, holding her tight. Lena doesn’t say “I was wondering when you were going to bring it up”, and for that Kara is grateful. They stand there for a long time, allowing the weight of trying to hide slide off Kara’s back for a second, allowing the silence to fill them up.

“You could tell me about it, if you want,” Lena offers and Kara doesn’t know where to start, can feel the stories bubble up inside her, all the things she wants to say. Instead, she goes to sit on the couch and waits for Lena to join her while she tries to sort her head out and find a point to start.

“Our sun, Krypton’s sun, was red,” she begins, and that’s as good a place to start as anywhere else. “Some days, I still look up and expect to see red.”

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me on tumblr [here](http://www.daisyjchnscns.tumblr.com)


End file.
